Hope
by jeviennis
Summary: When the Doctor left them together back on the beach, Rose and the almost-Doctor started to hope that things might go back to normal.


Hope

When the Doctor left them together back on the beach, Rose and the almost-Doctor started to hope that things might go back to normal. That Rose would love him, that they'd have a family, grow old together, do everything that Rose had wanted with the proper Doctor.

As it turned out, hope didn't always mean that they got what they wanted.

For the first month, things were good. Great. Fine. Rose woke up next to the almost-Doctor every morning, rolled over and smelt that odd scent of sandalwood that his hair seemed to reek of, went downstairs and made him breakfast – pancakes, like he'd always loved.

_Actually, _he said, _I'm more of a croissants man myself._

So she went to the shop and bought him croissants.

In the second month, the cracks started to appear. Rose sat down on a Friday with fish & chips to watch The Weakest Link, when the almost-Doctor plonked himself down on the sofa next to him. It had always been one of Rose's favourite TARDIS pastimes to tell the Doctor to tune in to BBC1 on that big clever space telly so they could guess all the answers and mock the idiocy of the blonde woman from Surrey who thought that Pluto was bigger than Jupiter, so when the almost-Doctor made a little comment without fully being aware that he was doing it, whilst grabbing a chip, Rose's heart stopped and turned cold.

_Ugh, this programme is so bloody annoying._

He wasn't the Doctor. He looked like the Doctor and smelt like the Doctor, and walked like the Doctor and talked like the Doctor, but he wasn't the Doctor. She'd been right on that beach. He wasn't him.

Gradually, as the months went by, Rose found herself comparing him to the Doctor more and more: he cut his hair just a little shorter than the Doctor's – too short, in her opinion – he didn't wear suits, just jeans and t-shirts, but Rose always loved a man in a clean cut pinstripe combo; her Doctor was vanishing, being sucked out of the air around her by a stranger. It was bad, she thought, to compare the man you are supposed to love to his clone and find faults.

Both of them knew something was wrong, but they were too scared of being alone with their own minds to do anything about it.

Every time Rose thought about it, there was a sound in her ears, like glass tinkling to the ground, and a stabbing pain in her chest, and she knew that a little more of her heart had broken. But she stayed silent because a nagging thought in the back of her head repeated itself, over and over.

_Better an almost-Doctor than no Doctor at all._

The almost-Doctor didn't think about it. Didn't want to. Because he knew he was right; he had the Doctor's intellect, despite their differences, and he knew that relationships weren't supposed to be like this. They were supposed to snuggle and watch shitty rom-coms, they were supposed to talk walks at night, preferably on a coastline, and whenever she inevitably got cold, he would take off his jacket and place it on her shoulder, and they'd walk hand in hand, not needing to talk because they already knew what the other was thinking.

They didn't talk because there was nothing to say.

A year passed, and neither of them had mentioned that anything might be wrong. When the almost-Doctor came down and ate his croissant, they smiled at each other from across the table just a little too brightly, and when they kissed, they parted a little too quickly, their mouths not moulding together like they did in the movies. When he left for work – after all, he'd had to find a job – Rose would nearly sigh in relief, but then she'd catch herself, scolding her brain for even thinking that.

_Of course things were okay, don't be stupid. She loved him._

But when the almost-Doctor would crack a joke around the Christmas dinner table, she'd laugh a little too loud and little too falsely because inside she was trying to maintain that she was happy. That she wasn't still in love with the idea of the Doctor. That she wasn't just in love with the idea of the Doctor.

Through the sniggers and the crackers and the reindeer bunting, the almost-Doctor saw her laugh and saw that there was nothing behind it. The light he thought he had come to love was gone. He'd taken what the Doctor had loved so much and turned it into a drone, a shell, a shade. And he knew, in the deepest darkest recess of his mind, that the proper Doctor wouldn't have done that. From the right side of his body, where his second heart should be, there was a dull ache. A reminder.

If it was possible, the almost-Doctor began to feel jealous of himself.

One year and six months after the events on the beach, Rose and the almost-Doctor stopped saying that they loved one another. They felt sick when they said it, forced the words out like they were toxic, and so they came to a mutual unspoken agreement that it would be better if they didn't say it all. They just continued smiling their strained smiles at one other, their faces falling at the speed of light once the other had turned around.

They didn't sit together on the sofa anymore. They put on Big Brother and ate their fish & chips in silence, the almost-Doctor sat on the armchair the furthest away from it, making some throwaway comment under his breath about there being less glare from the sunlight on the screen. Rose didn't hear. She didn't need to. She knew the problem.

It was awkward. When they went out with friends on a Friday night to ring in the weekend with style, they'd hold hands out of habit. Muscle memory. Rose's friends would squeal and stage-whisper.

_Oh you're so adorable, honestly, you're the cutest couple ever, you and John._

Two months after the beach, they'd agreed that they couldn't introduce him as the Doctor forever, because Rose's friends wouldn't understand. She hadn't hastened to add that she would never feel comfortable calling him the Doctor. He hadn't hastened to add that he would never feel comfortable being called the Doctor. Especially since he'd looked into her eyes and seen the ghost of a girl who'd loved and lost.

More time went by and the cracks splintered and grew. The already miniscule tethers desperately holding the two frayed and thinned. And still, they said nothing.

Around them, the pressures grew.

_Might we be hearing wedding bells anytime soon?_

_Might we be hearing the pitter-patter of tiny feet anytime soon?_

On the frequently increasing nights that the almost-Doctor worked late, Rose would lay in bed and let herself be. Cry, scream, punch. It didn't take a genius to work out that she couldn't bring up a child in a home where Mummy and Daddy pretended to love each other. As soon as she did that, everything about the family would be a lie, and that was not what she'd spent so many nights awake imagining would happen with the proper Doctor.

So she stayed silent, kept herself to herself. Touches lessened, glances became less intimate and more about reassurance that she hadn't been the one to break this, even though she knew that whatever they were had been broken since the moment they took each other's hand in Norway.

In the morning, Rose wouldn't roll over and smell sandalwood. The morning she woke up to the smell of peppermint was the moment the remaining shards of hope fell from her chest and she knew properly, for the first time in one year and eleven months, that the Doctor was gone. Her Doctor was gone.

And just like that, she knew she had to leave.

So she packed herself a bag and rang Jackie's sister in France, asking for a place to stay. She cleaned the house from top to bottom and took the last croissant in the packet out of the oven and placed it on the table with a note next to it.

_I hope you're happy, whatever you do._

When the almost-Doctor woke up and made his way into the kitchen, he wasn't surprised to see the small envelope with his name on it. John. He was John. He wasn't surprised to read the seven words on the page, not shaky or smudged, as though they'd been written in tears, but steady and neat, like one whose mind had been made up long ago. He wasn't surprised to see Rose's small backpack gone from by her bedside, and he wasn't surprised to hear Jackie coming in through the back door with a demanding tone to her words.

He was almost glad.

As he smeared jam onto his croissant, he thought to himself, the first true thought in one year, eleven months and one day.

_I hope you're happy too._


End file.
